


Memory of a Dear Place

by SinningVirtue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post Reichenbach, coming home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 12:41:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinningVirtue/pseuds/SinningVirtue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock dies when the sky is screaming blue and the world is waiting for his next move and John is waiting to tell him things he should have that first night in Angelo’s. Sherlock dies when he’s looking at John and John is looking back. Sherlock dies--<br/>Except he doesn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory of a Dear Place

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah. This is just a one shot and stuff so please leave a comment. Please?  
> Hope you like it.

Memory of a Dear Place

 

Sherlock dies when pieces of blue sky are making themselves known. When the slate grey London canvas is broken in by pieces of a near cobalt blue, brilliant in its intensity. It almost blinds John, and he remembers the taste of Afghanistan so well, dust coating the back of his throat and endless blue sky that wrapped around his world like the lightest of blankets.

 

Sherlock dies when the wind dies down.

 

When the world grows quiet, for a rare consuming moment that pushes everyone into the penitent silence of passerby confessing their sins to the streets with their footsteps.

 

He dies when a café down the street has its grand opening and a dog gets hit by a car and an old woman is mugged and a child loses a balloon and the first of many yellow graffiti signs is sprayed on the New Scotland Yard building.

 

It says:

_I believe in Sherlock Holmes._

 

Sherlock dies then.

 

And the next day there is more graffiti.

_I fight Watson’s War._

 

Sherlock dies before he can see it, a phone pressed to his ear and his voice sounding thick and constricted. Not like him at all.

 

He dies before he can see the one they paint on Parliament:

_Richard Brooke is a Lie._

 

He dies before Kitty Riley quits her job and the papers print apologies. He dies before he can see Molly move on, get a guy that cares about her. Before Donovan comes to Baker Street with her chin jutting out and her eyes a strange tinge of red and spoke to John like she knew him. Before John kicked her out with a stare so cold she’d wake from dreams of it shivering. Before Lestrade called him, drunk and desperate, and John came to pick him up out of the gutter and keep him together.

 

Which are things John wishes he could have seen.

 

Sherlock dies when the sky is screaming blue and the world is waiting for his next move and John is waiting to tell him things he should have that first night in Angelo’s. Sherlock dies when he’s looking at John and John is looking back. Sherlock dies--

 

Except he doesn’t.

 

Xx

 

When he comes back, because he would always come back, his hair is longer. It curls over his ears and against his jaw in a snarling mess and his eyes are hollow juxtaposed against his sharp cheekbones and his ribs are raised like bone ripples thinly veiled in pale flesh.

 

When he comes back, his voice is hoarse and slow and his words are lost in Russian.

 

The blinds are pulled in tight against Baker Street and the flat is empty, dust layers his things and his violin case lies open by the window. The street outside is tattooed with yellow graffiti, a single phrase in the center of the road that’s etched in a smooth, curving script. It stays because it’s beautiful, in its own way.

 

It makes something burn and tear in the center of his chest.

 

He sees this every day:

_We fight Watson’s War._

 

And he’ll keep seeing it.

 

When he comes back, he doesn’t want to deduce John’s habits. The footprints of data he can glean from an empty flat that will tell him how his best friend mourned, what pieces of him were lost and what pieces moved on.

 

But he can’t miss the three cots that have replaced John’s bed, where he lets members of the homeless network sleep after they’ve gotten hurt or sick.

 

Sometimes Sherlock is still astounded by how little he deserves the doctor.

 

When he comes back, he doesn’t feel like he’s allowed to sit, not yet.

 

So he doesn’t.

 

Instead he picks up his violin and runs his fingertips over the strings, fiddles with them absently, expertly, and for the first time in a year, starts to play.

 

Xx

 

When John comes back, Tchaikovsky’s Méditation de Souvenir d'un Lieu Cher is weaving through the all the empty spaces. It means Memory of a Dear Place, and John likes that title, likes the feeling it gives him.

 

It’s a piece he knows by heart, one so full to the brim with sadness and regret it sings it’s sorrows in the bottom of his heart on the bad days, the days when the sky’s turned black and the nightmares leech the heat from his soul.

 

It’s a piece Sherlock had only played in the early hours, when he could hear John thrashing overhead with the burn of a phantom bullet and the hot twist of a knife in the meat of his leg. And it had soothed, then, made the shouts from upstairs fade.

 

He wonders if it soothes now, as John’s back hits the door and he slides down it. His head is in his hands.

 

He looks so tired.

 

The months apart have not been so kind to them.

 

John has lost weight, inches off the waistline visible despite the oatmeal jumper, and his face is care-worn and set in a sadness Sherlock hadn’t understood until he stood on the edge of his universe and jumped.

 

He pauses, for just a moment hovers on the inside of this moment, where John isn’t looking at him but Sherlock thinks he might be crying.

 

“Keep going,” John whispers, his voice wet and warped with the strength it takes to hold back sobs.

 

So he does.

 

He plays until his fingers hurt and then he plays more.

 

He feels like he’s breathing too loud, like he’s caught in cobwebs laced with silence and he can do nothing but wait out John’s shaking shoulders. He wonders how often John has come home like this in a year, limp haunting his steps and his eyes empty and dark and his hand trembling. Fumbling through the grey with habitual steps and unchanging mannerisms just trying to find a patch of sunshine to seek warmth in.

 

He wonders if John knows that feeling like he does.

 

When John comes back, slipping back into himself in slow increments, the music twists away into nothingness, and Sherlock’s arms drop.

 

“A woman at surgery today told me that her son’d wanted to be just like Sherlock Holmes,” John says.

 

His voice has changed, it sounds softer and colder all at once.

 

But then, Sherlock’s changed too.

 

“He killed himself two months after you, three weeks before your name was cleared.”

 

And his face is red from where the woman slapped him, his jumper clinging to foreign fibers and damp from where she clung to him and cried.

 

Sherlock doesn’t know how to form the words he should. He doesn’t know how to give ‘I’m sorry’ to the wind and let it blow John’s way. He doesn’t know how to spray paint ‘I fight Watson’s War’ on the inside of his lungs so every breath screams it’s for John. He doesn’t know how to tattoo himself with ‘Please forgive me’ so that John can read his skin and give him an answer.

 

He doesn’t know how to do any of that.

 

So when Sherlock comes back, he doesn’t.

 

When Sherlock comes back, he turns to the window, leaves the blinds shut, and imagines the time erased. Imagines, for a moment, that there was no dead-wind, blue-pocketed day. There was no edge and there was no fall. There was only him and John and a cuppa and a James Bond movie for Sherlock to yell at in other languages in varying degrees of accuracy.

 

“Я скучаю по тебе.”

_I missed you._

 

“Why is it always Russian with you?” John asks, lost and sad looking.

 

“You don’t speak Russian.”

 

John tries on a smile, it’s stretched thin and breakable.

 

But it’s what Sherlock comes back to.

 

Xx

 

John sleeps in Sherlock’s room now, because his room is a half-way house for members of the homeless network.

 

So Sherlock takes the couch.

 

Neither of them discuss it.

 

Xx

 

He dreams about waking up again in Russia, his bones heavy and skin layered with sweat and old blood. He dreams about the way sunlight felt on the back of his neck and the dead bodies he’d passed out among. He dreams about the shower and the cracks in the tiles, the mold in the corners, the cold water against his body as he washed away the evidence.

 

He dreams about dying his hair blonde in the sink, something in his chest tightening uncomfortably when he barely recognizes himself.

 

He dreams so well he wakes up believing he’s still there.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock takes a case in his first week back.

 

He asks John, though asking tastes wrong on the tip of his tongue and he wants to just hold out the man’s coat and insist. But time has crumbled so much of them. He asks, and John says no.

 

He tries not to feel anything at all as he walks outside to catch a cab alone.

_I fight Watson’s War_ is burned into the back of his retinas, and he wonders just what that fight is for.

 

Lestrade hugs him. Punches him. And hugs him again.

 

Sherlock doesn’t mention the wetness that clings to his collar when he pulls away, and Lestrade doesn’t mention the soft words of forgiveness Sherlock had murmured or the glaring empty space at his side. John-shaped and gaping like a new wound.

 

When he gets back he cuts his hair, and it curls like it used to and he doesn’t feel so out of place.

 

John limps inside slowly, his eyes tracing Sherlock as if he is a new piece of furniture he’s not gotten used to yet.

 

“Play for me?” he asks, after a moment, sinking down into his chair with his laptop out.

 

Sherlock does.

 

He chooses Bach’s violin sonata in G minor, because he’s not done apologizing yet. Because there are still weights on John’s shoulders and his smiles are still paper thin and he looks at Sherlock like he might blow away in the wind.

 

Xx

 

“You look so sad, when you think he can’t see you,” Mycroft tells him, after John has left for the clinic.

 

His elder brother’s face is a mask of calm Sherlock knows broke when he sent a text from the heart of Moriarty’s web in the Ukraine. _May require minimal assistance._

 

Sherlock rips a well-placed camera from behind one of John’s medical texts.

 

Xx

 

He dreams one night of Afghanistan, when he followed the second assassin to Kabul. He can feel the sand filling up every crevice of him and burning his eyes.

 

When he wakes he can taste the desert in the back of his throat, and wonders if he’s awake at all.

 

Xx

 

When Mrs. Hudson or Lestrade or one of the homeless network are in the room with them, John doesn’t look at Sherlock. It’s so rare now, for anyone to want to come to Baker Street, but when it happens, he doesn’t look at Sherlock.

 

The air around them swims with a silence caught between prayer and mourning, and the visitors follow the doctor’s lead. They do not look at Sherlock. They do not speak to him or about him. They leave what they came to drop off, or make their way into John’s still available bed rooms and try to forget they ever saw the haunted blank look on John Watson’s face. They try not to think about how much they wish Sherlock could wipe it away.

 

How much it hurts to know he hasn’t yet.

 

They’ve played their parts for a year now, and the two of them don’t look quite right anymore. John and Sherlock fit together imperfectly when they should have slotted into place. So no one looks at Sherlock, no one talks to him.

 

Sherlock thinks it’s a lot like respect for the dead.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock dreams and lives and lives and dreams and dreams—

 

Until he’s not sure which is the dream anymore.

 

Xx

 

“John look at me,” Sherlock says.

 

He hasn’t been spoken to in more than a week by the smaller man, who’s hovered over his keyboard with fingers that have become accustomed to technology.

 

John glances up, and holds.

 

“Say something.”

 

“Why’d you have to leave?” John asks.

 

Two months and he hasn’t asked. Two months and he’d let it hang there, like a fat and swollen spider ready to descend on them. Sherlock wishes he could answer with a concerto.

 

He moves from the window, where the curtains have remained closed, and sits next to John. They don’t touch. Haven’t.

 

Won’t?

 

“He was going to kill you. It was me or you, and it could never be you.”

 

Sherlock dies before he can see John break, the way he looks when they rip him away from a body that kidnapped frightened children and did not live in 221B and framed a genius, the way he stops talking because there are no words, the way he fights for a detective’s memory.

 

“Sometimes I like to think this flat is another world,” John says quietly. “That nothing can touch us here. That there’s just me and you and your music and my writing. And that’s enough. I know it isn’t. But I like to pretend it is.”

 

Sherlock reaches out, his hand hovering over John’s shoulder, where a bullet kissed him and brought him here.

 

“I would never have left this place if I could have helped it,” he says, and he can feel John’s heat seeping into his skin. “After all, London’s air is sweeter for my presence.” He smiles, John returns it.

 

He can almost pretend they’re okay.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock wakes up in the Ukraine.

 

Or.

 

Falls asleep there.

 

Or.

 

Dreams of it.

 

He kills a man with his bare hands for the first time, but it is not his last.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock comes back too late to see John take a homeless man out to dinner for the first time. To see the way they talked about the consulting detective like he was the sun, the way John was still perfecting his smile, the way he pushed until two were in a cab and he was treating an infected cut and setting him up for the night. Sherlock misses the first time John orders Chinese without him, and the way he avoids Angelo’s like it has the plague and the moment he falls back into a limp and the day he gets a book contract, to write about the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson MD.

 

He deduces it quickly enough.

 

He hates that he missed it.

 

Xx

 

In London he tracks Moran to an abandoned building, a week before he steps back inside 221B. He is thin, held together by an Ace bandage and luck, wearing at the seams.

 

He passes an abandoned building tattooed with yellow graffiti.

_Richard Brooke was a lie._

 

He kills Moran.

 

Xx

 

While he’s in Russia he has a dream about kissing John.

 

Backing him up against the wall and whispering words in languages John doesn’t know but can feel in the marrow of his bones. Running his fingers through short hair and cradling his skull and wanting to _dissect_ him. Wanting to take him piece by piece and study him. To kiss a Y-incision on his chest and peer into the cage of his ribs.

 

He wants to say things he barely understands the meaning to, just because they taste right on his tongue when he whispers them to himself.

_я_ _люблю_ _тебя_

_Te iubesc_

_Te amo_

_Sa rang he_

_Ich liebe dich_

_Ik hou van jou_

_Wo ai ni_

_Ti amo_

_Je t'aime_

_I love you._

 

Xx

 

Three months pass, and Sherlock is wrapped up in grey. In between here and there and lost.

 

Floating.

 

He wants to grab John by the shoulders and beg for him to look alive. For him to look like _John_. To ask him to eat or to question his sleeping habits or follow him on cases or whisper _amazingbrilliantfantastic_ under his breath.

 

But he doesn’t.

 

He came back too late for that, and the spaces just around John are impenetrable. His flatmate is a ghost, or Sherlock has become one without his knowing.

 

Lestrade is there, holding a cold case between his hands and looking as out of place in the cluttered flat as he always does. Sherlock sometimes catches himself thankful for the DI’s existence, and the way the two of them slid back into their roles as if Sherlock was never gone. He needs that.

 

“So the nurse did it?”

 

“Of course she did. Really Lestrade, if you bothered to _look_ at the things you sent me, you’d realize how obvious they are. It was a two at best,” he says emphatically, as he drops onto the couch inelegantly.

 

Lestrade rolls his eyes.

 

“And the other?”

 

“Need to run an experiment, should have the results in fifty two hours.”

 

When John comes back he stops in the doorway, the shopping crashes to the floor, slipping from numb fingertips. And the whole world has stopped turning. There’s a dumb sort of shock that hovers over John’s face, and he looks lost and lonely and wholly shattered. A spider web crack pattern in glass tapped so lightly it falls inward and rains shards that look like diamonds that look like raindrops that draw blood.

 

Sherlock sits up sharply, worry creasing lines on his face as Lestrade stoops to help the doctor.

 

John hasn’t moved. He blinks, and his voice is child-like and impossibly soft when he whispers:

 

“You can see him too?”

 

Xx

 

“You’ve---you’ve been real for three months?” John says, when it is just the two of them again. When the quiet in the flat eats at them and Sherlock’s mind is screaming in languages he doesn’t even know. He should have seen. Should have caught it.

Sherlock nods, and wonders if he will wake from this in the Czech Republic.

 

He thinks they are both so lost, clinging to memories of a dear place and playing Tchaikovsky in their heads. He thinks the fall tore something vital from their chests, a piece of them that can recognize each other was lost to the pavement that day.

 

It was yellow.

 

It paints itself in brilliant tattoos across the city.

_I believe in Sherlock Holmes._

_Richard Brooke was a lie._

_I fight Watson’s War._

 

“Alive,” John whispers, as if to try the word out on his tongue.

 

Sherlock reaches, and fancies his fingers will pass through John’s skin. They don’t. John is warm and solid beneath Sherlock’s hand as he finds shoulder, slides to back, and brings himself close to the heat.

 

They embrace, because they are rooted in this time, where they are both lucky enough to exist beside one another. Because Sherlock has been gone for a year and three months. Because there is no music playing. Because there are no homeless in John’s bedroom tonight and the stars are out. John tucks his head against Sherlock’s neck and just breathes there for a while. Sherlock can feel his breath travel down until it brushes the wings of his collar bone.

 

“You absolute bloody _moron_. Don’t---you’ve _no idea_ what it was like,” John says suddenly, fiercely, shoving Sherlock’s bony shoulders. His eyes have light again. Fire. It burns through him until it feels to be falling into Sherlock. He takes it, lets the warmth spread through his limbs to the tips of his fingers. “Watching you fall, I watched you _die_. I--”

 

“I will always choose you,” Sherlock answers. Because there is no other response, because the truth in his words has woken him up at night for a year and three months, hover in different countries with battle wounds and battle scars and he knows what it means to value a life. And John’s is worth more than his.

 

“I thought alone was what protected you?”

 

There’s a bitterness there that catches on one of the grey patches, on one of the spaces Sherlock will religiously ignore.

 

Sherlock comes back to life when three cold cases are solved, one experiment goes unfinished, ten children are born in London, an old woman is helped across the street, and the clouds break to let out the stars. He comes back when their couch is still threadbare and smells like cigarette ash and their kitchen is mostly hygienic and John’s bedroom is a half-way house for the homeless network and the life comes back into John’s eyes.

 

 “Man túra dúst daram,” Sherlock murmurs, and his voice cracks at the end.

 

John smiles, and his hands are callused and careful as they skim up Sherlock’s arm and rest on his jaw. Later, John will open the blinds and they will be able to see _I Fight Watson’s War_ and Sherlock will think of a copy of himself haunting a doctor for a year and will begin to understand what the message means. Sherlock will put in James Bond, because John likes it and Sherlock likes to pick it apart. They will order Chinese, because they haven’t yet and John will ask him to deduce the fortune cookie. Later still, they will lie next to each other beneath the sheets with London light pouring in and whisper the past year to each other until they feel like they can sleep. John will wake from a nightmare, and Sherlock will play him Tchaikovsky.

 

But for now, there is the color of John’s eyes and the thrumming of Sherlock’s heart.

 

“I can speak Farsi.”

 

Sherlock nods, shaky and brushing up against unsure.

 

“I know.”

 

Pale eyes roam across the tan planes of John’s face, and find memories of dear places. All their moments here that makes John able to go on. This place where nothing can touch them and they are whole. This place where it tastes like London and swarms into every crevice of their bodies and kept them breathing.

 

John looks at him in a way that makes him think of _I believe in Sherlock Holmes._ Like there is something worth finding in Sherlock’s ribcage. Like his body is made of symphonies and his words are dear places for John to hold on to. Like the doctor wants to take him apart and put him back together again, wants to lay his fingerprints on every organ and memory and wish and bone and dream and vessel. Like John is awake and alive and Sherlock’s lungs burn with holding his breath.

 

“I love you too.”


End file.
